The Methusaleh Gene

Because he did not drink anything containing alcohol, Dr. Balfour celebrated the news that he would be awarded the Nobel prize by inviting several friends to a coffee shop. Everyone in the corporation was working long hours and so they met late at night, after work. Dr. Balfour accepted congratulations and said that it was important that they not let the prize distract them from their important labors. “I suppose I will have to go to Oslo,” Dr. Balfour said, “to accept the honor.” His CFO replied: “You are thinking of the Nobel Peace Prize. That is awarded in Oslo.” One of Dr. Balfour’s research assistants added: “The Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology is awarded in Stockholm.” Another research assistant said: “They should give you both prizes.” Everyone agreed with that proposition so important was Dr. Balfour’s work for the fate of the world.

Dr. Balfour didn’t like public speaking and avoided giving interviews. So he decided to spend the next several weeks at the research site near Lone Pine. Before dawn the next day, he put a few essentials in a suit-bag and drove from Mill Valley across the valleys and mountains to the small town under the eroded badlands riding the high barren foothills just the east of Mount Whitney. The drive took him most of the day. When he reached the motel in Lone Pine, the manager embraced him and said that he was the savior of mankind and he found a fruit basket wrapped in shimmering cellophane on the night-stand next to his bed.

Longaeva, Dr. Balfour’s corporation, had built a laboratory across the grey-yellow trough of the Owens Valley, on one of the high ridges that intersected with the sierra of the White Mountains. The laboratory was white, a modular structure surrounded by a high chain link fence, the compound built below the level where the snow whitened the stony shoulders of the mountain range in November. From the laboratory’s parking lot, the entire valley, a great rift between ranges of mountains was visible – the barren land and the low places where the rivers vanished between jaws of infernal-looking black rock and the higher country cultivated in places and woven into a quiltwork of green and, then, the Sierra foothills eroded into parks of round rock knobs like chess pieces strewn across the desert. Except for Lone Pine and a few hamlets on the lofty terraces leading up toward Yosemite, the valley was uninhabited and the White Mountains where Longaeva’s technicians collected genetic samples from the bristlecones were mostly roadless, an empty plateau without lakes or rivers or surface water of any kind and, therefore, without people. It was a good hermitage, a place remote from the public eye where you could see strangers approaching fifty miles away across the deserted country.

In the afternoon, when the icy morning chill had departed from the heights, Dr. Balfour drove a jeep on a mule path clinging to the outer edge of the White Mountains, a ledge suspended above the hot-looking valley where dust-devils were prancing across dehydrated lake beds. He parked on a narrow shelf beneath the ancient bristlecones. Walking with a cane, and leaning forward because of the gusts of wind, he toured his plantation. This was an altitude where the warm air baking the valley floor mixed with the glacial breezes of the upper sky and the wind was like a faucet sometimes turned to hot and, then, cold. Smaller tracks led between the big, cracked slabs of rock, a quarry pried apart by the tenacious chisel-roots of the bristlecones. A couple of workers in white lab coats were probing a tree that stood disheveled and bare, an octopus of roots and twisted limbs atop a talus slope of shattered, yellow stone. Prevailing winds had flared the top of the tree into a kind of signpost pointing away from the gale that had sculpted the wood and a few tufts of acid-green needle shimmered in the cleft wood, showing Dr. Balfour that the tree that the men were bent against, core-sampling the granite-colored wood, was still somehow alive. Down the slope, a tree that an avalanche had uprooted lay against a boulder, gesturing up toward the living specimen on the ridge, somehow seeming more alive in its catastrophic death than the bristlecone still clinging to the rocks above. Dr. Balfour limped to the dead tree. It’s main branch was twisted like a baldachinno in a cathedral and tentacle-like roots spread across the fan of gravel at the base of the ravine. The vast, deep world was spread beneath him.

A technician skidding in the loose stone descended to where Dr. Balfour was sitting.

“Congratulations,” the technician said, grinning at him.

The wind swirled between the two men.

“Thank you,” Dr. Balfour said. He took deep breaths. The air was thin.

“Are you okay?” The technician asked.

“Just a little out of breath,” Dr. Balfour replied.

“You deserve every award in the world,” the technician said. “I mean for what you’ve done.”

“I don’t want the awards and fame to distract us from our work,” Dr. Balfour said. “It’s important that we continue to make progress.”

“It’s the most important thing in the world,” the technician said.

“Are you getting good samples?”

“Very good,” the technician reported.

It looked for a moment like the technician wanted to shake his hand. But Dr. Balfour’s right wrist was deformed and his hand withered like the claw of a bird and, when he greeted people, he extended his good left hand sideways, as if he were about slip a letter into a mail slot.

“I wish I understood more about ecology, you know, the systems of living things,” Dr. Balfour said. “This is an environment characterized by scarcity of resources. Would you agree?”

He looked around them, at the tilted slabs of rock, quartz crystals glinting in the cold sunlight.

“I guess,” the technician said.

“I wonder if the trees have adapted to this place or if they have exhausted all the resources and created the scarcity up here.”

“Who can tell?” the technician said.

“They are such slow livers,” Dr. Balfour said. “Maybe, their long lives are like those of vampires. They suck the juice out of everything around them and make a wasteland.”

“I don’t know,” the technician said. “Do you believe in vampires?”

“Not literally,” Dr. Balfour replied.

Higher on the slope, the other technician shouted something, but the wind caught his words and turned them away.

“Your work is vital,” Dr. Balfour said. “The longevity gene from the tree is integral to our process.”

“Yes,” the technician said. “Do you need help getting back to your vehicle?”

“I’ll manage,” Dr. Balfour said. He nodded to the man and, then, limped down the trail.

At the compound on the hill, congratulatory messages clogged the email in-boxes on the computers. The President called from the White House but the girl managing the phone system thought that it was a joke and disconnected him. A couple days later, a defense department helicopter landed at the heliport next to the infirmary in Lone Pine. Dr. Balfour was gone for several days. When he returned to the valley, he told the scientists at the laboratory that he couldn’t speak about his adventures in Washington. A couple of slate-grey military drones, silent as big kites, hung aloft in the air, abstract, weightless pinatas dangling motionlessly over the desert. “One day, I will write my memoirs,” Dr. Balfour said. “Then, the story will be told.”


A few days before the ceremony in Stockholm, a Longaeva company helicopter screwed itself down out of the blue air to land on the playa in the valley’s trough. The helicopter’s rotor stirred borax and gypsum crystals into a cloud around the landing place.

The helicopter rose over Lone Pine, found a pass between two jagged peaks in the Sierra Nevada and ferried Dr. Balfour back to Mill Valley. On the return flight to corporate headquarters, Dr. Balfour asked his secretary to determine whether he would require a tuxedo for his meeting with Swedish royal family. She looked at pictures of past ceremonies on the internet and said that she thought that formal attire was necessary as well as a sash or cumberbund. “Arrange for those things to be brought to my hotel in Stockholm,” Dr. Balfour said.

Longaeva’s jet was kept at the Sonoma County airport at Santa Rosa. Dr. Balfour’s wife and daughter drove him to the airport. Security had called TSA to arrange for Dr. Balfour’s arrival and his smooth departure. But the sky darkened as he arrived at the terminal, and, then, there was rain and tempest-winds followed by chilly fog. Dr. Balfour waited with his wife and daughter in a small conference room just beyond the checkpoint. There was an important recording studio in Santa Rosa and many famous musicians had passed through the airport over the years, often waiting outside of the public eye in the small, bright conference room. Framed and autographed pictures of celebrities in the music world adorned the walls and Dr. Balfour’s daughter pored over them, whispering the names of the musicians to herself.

One of the TSA workers came to the room where Dr. Balfour was waiting with his wife and daughter. The man was burly and seemed to be half-Mexican and he had a small boy with him. The child looked alert, but wizened and he moved stiffly, as if he were afraid to twist at the waist. His thin arms were bruised at the IV sites.

The TSA guard sputtered as he spoke: “Dr. Balfour, Dr. Balfour, I’m so happy – you are the – thank him, Jeremy, you must thank him!”

The man reached to shake Dr. Balfour’s hand and, then, seemed puzzled, even a little hurt, when the scientist extended his left hand only, turning it sideways as if to slide a letter through the narrow slot of the mailbox. Dr. Balfour kept his damaged right hand close to his belly.

“You don’t have to thank me,” Dr. Balfour said.

“You saved my child,” the man told him. “This is my only son. My wife can’t have another. You gave us hope. You gave us hope.”

Because of the prosthetic, Dr. Balfour didn’t feel the child clutching at his right leg. He felt a tug in his trousers at his waist-line and looked down to see the child’s thin hair, some blisters and scabs on his scalp, and, then, the small boy looking up at him with his bright eyes and strangely aged face.

“We can hope to see him graduate from High School now and, maybe, get married and, then, maybe grandchildren. You’ve given us all this, sir. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Seeing your boy doing so well is all the thanks I need,” Dr. Balfour said cautiously. “And you should thank your doctor, your little boy’s pediatrician, for having the courage to recommend our therapy.”

“You’ve done so much for the world,” the TSA guard said. His eyes filled with tears. He stooped and lifted the child, clutching him tightly.

“I wish I had something to give you,” the man said.

“Your kind words are thanks enough,” Dr. Balfour said.

Dr. Balfour’s daughter looked embarrassed. She turned her face to the pictures on the wall and began to spell-out the names of the celebrities who had autographed their photographs.

The air cleared a little and the fog retreated to the sky, darkening the air above the landing strips. The humidity smelled of eucalyptus as Dr. Balfour hustled across the runway, limping as fast as he could to reach the plane.

Over Iceland, Dr. Balfour’s wife brought him a cup of coffee. Their daughter was asleep and Dr. Balfour heard her regular and deep breathing, a counterpoint to the muffled howl of the jet engine shuddering underfoot.

“Are you going to tell them?” Dr. Balfour’s wife asked.

“Elliptically,” Dr. Balfour said. “Not outright but in so many words.”

“I think you should just tell them,” she said.

“The lawyer’s say that the side-effect isn’t established yet. It’s purely theoretical.”

“Well, the benefit seems to be established,” Dr. Balfour’s wife said. “You saw that child. In another month, he will be completely healed.”

“The new genome is malleable. Everything’s reversible. I can edit the DNA or splice it. We need to proceed carefully,” Dr. Balfour said. “But it would be irresponsible to graft transgenetically for longevity without a countervailing splice for population control. Where would we put all the people?”

“Probably, they will kill one another.”

“We have to consider that our resources are scarce.”

“I understand,” Dr. Balfour’s wife said.

“It’s for the best and it will be accepted. Don’t you think that man back at the airport would have accepted the trade-off?”

“I don’t know. No one asked him.”

Stockholm reminded Dr. Balfour of Seattle. Water shimmered everywhere reflecting the buildings. The structures along the waterfront were white-walled and crowned with ornate, helmet-like cupolas. Church steeples punctuated the skyline. Alabaster saints and kings stood on columns above the canals and their reflections rippled in the dark water. Night fell in the middle of the afternoon and the trees in the park were bare except for the silent, grim-looking evergreens.

At the hotel, Dr. Balfour noticed armed policemen standing in small groups, chatting affably while slowly turning their heads back and forth to survey the people in the lobby. Hotel personnel whisked them upstairs to their room.

Dr. Balfour called the concierge. “There is a very old tree or group of trees in a national park. I would like to arrange to see those trees.”

The concierge wasn’t sure what he meant. Everyone spoke perfect English with a slightly musical inflection.

In the closet in their suite, Dr. Balfour found his tuxedo and stiff white shirt with white tie. The tuxedo dangled from its hanger like the carcass of a freshly slaughtered animal.

“It says you can attend wearing the ‘colorful garb’ of your native country,” he wife said, reading from the Nobel Prize website.

“What would the colorful garb of New Jersey look like?” Dr. Balfour asked.

He took a bath to relax. Dr. Balfour’s wife and daughter looked at pictures of the gown that the Queen of Sweden had worn the year before to the banquet.

Dr. Balfour came from bathroom, draped in a robe. He had removed his prosthetic and so he hopped on one foot to the bed.

“This is a mistake,” he told his wife. “I shouldn’t be here. The work is too urgent. This is wasting time.”

“You are educating the world by being here,” Dr. Balfour’s wife said.

In the morning, a contingent of security guards arrived with a tour-guide and Dr. Balfour toured the city, driven from place to place in a black armored limousine. Lakes and elegant curving bays edged the city parks and barges bearing restaurants cruised slowly up and down the canals. Someone said that United States drones had been sighted above the city and that a protest was being lodged with the American embassy. Dr. Balfour said he knew nothing about those aircraft.

The limousine coursed along the boulevard by the Stockholm City Hall and Dr. Balfour studied the structure in its reflection in the waterway. The building was ugly, built of rust-colored brick, with a ponderous arcade of stone archways supporting a lantern-like square-tower shaped something like lamp with its lampshade missing. Protesters were gathering along the promenade in little surly knots, people squatting around canisters of hot coffee in the gathering gloom. Many of protesters were carrying placards and some of them were neatly printed in English: BALFOUR GO HOME! and NO DEATH NO HEAVEN and FRANKENBALFOUR: IT’S MONSTROUS and GIVE ME BACK MY PARADISE. The guide was apologetic.
“We have some religious fanatics in Sweden,” he said. “Not many. But you see they are in evidence.”

“I see,” Dr. Balfour said.

“Every Swede that I have met admires you intensely,” the guide said.

The guide said something to the driver in Swedish. The driver answered him.

“You see, Max, the driver says you are the greatest man in the world,” the guide said.

“That’s what we think,” Dr. Balfour’s wife said.

“I think they should give you the Nobel Peace Prize also,” the guide said. “It would be warranted.”

Back at the hotel, Dr. Balfour learned that the tree that he wanted to inspect was in Norway in a national park near the Arctic Circle. The tree had a name “Old Tjikko.” Someone had told Dr. Balfour about the tree when he thought that he would have to go to Oslo to receive his award.

Protesters outside the City Hall shrieked his name when he arrived for the banquet. There was a skirmish in the streets and a car was set afire. The banquet hall was suffused with pinkish-red light and acrobats and mimes from a famous circus performed on a small stage near the lectern from which the acceptance speeches were to be given. When Dr. Balfour gave his speech, several people shouted at him from the gloom in the rear of the hall and there was a brief scuffle. Dr. Balfour didn’t know what was being shouted.

From the podium, he looked across the groups of dignitaries all seated in neat rows at the long, white tables. The masonry walls towering overhead made the sounds emerging from the loudspeakers echo in unpredictable ways. As he spoke, sometimes it seemed to him that a multitude of voices were speaking, echos murmuring within echos, and, it seemed, that people were translating his words so that there were more murmurs, a babble of tongues.

“It may seem paradoxical,” Dr. Balfour began, “but I think it important to emphasize population control as a responsibility intrinsic to the great advances we have made in genome engineering.”

When he finished, everyone in the hall rose to their feet and clapped their hands and shouted acclamations to him. The meal was arctic fish cooked in complex sauces, pheasant, and several dishes that were unfamiliar to him. Later, the King of Sweden tried to shake his hand, but Dr. Balfour kept his withered wrist and fingers close to his ribs and, instead, extended his left hand tilting it sideways as if to drop a letter through a slender slot on a mail box . The king had strangely glittering eyes.

After the banquet, Dr. Balfour was escorted to a ballroom in another part of the City Hall. He didn’t dance but watched his wife and daughter take the floor with cavaliers of the Swedish Royal Academy. An orchestra played waltzes interspersed with national anthems.
A little after midnight, a Swedish secret service man in a frost-colored tuxedo wired with communications gear approached Dr. Balfour and said that his limousine was waiting outside. Dr. Balfour limped from the ballroom, past the banquet hall where neatly uniformed Polish and Ukrainian workers were dismantling the tables and stacking chairs. Under the frigid brick archways, it was gloomy and the limousine was nowhere to be seen. “It must have gone around the block,” the secret service man said.

Some people dressed in City Hall uniforms, apparently waiters and waitresses, stood huddled against the arches of cold masonry smoking cigarettes. Among them was a pale, young woman carrying a huge bouquet of flowers – it appeared as if she had assembled several of the place-setting bouquets from the banquet tables.

“Dr. Balfour,” the woman cried. “You save my daughter. You save my daughter.”
Her words sounded Russian-accented.

She waggled the bouquet in front of her body and approached the place where Dr. Balfour and his wife and daughter were standing. The Swedish secret service man stepped forward to intervene between her and Dr. Balfour. But Dr. Balfour waved him aside. “It’s okay,” he said.

The woman pushed the flowers forward toward Dr. Balfour. “You save my daughter,” she said. Her face twitched for second and her eyes seemed to stall and go dead and, then, there was a great flash and roar.

The explosion blew Dr. Balfour apart, thereby killing the man who had defeated death. The woman with the flowers and the secret service man were also shredded by the blast. The bouquet of flowers flew across the arcade and landed against the wall next to the smoking ruin of Dr. Balfour’s artificial leg. Dr. Balfour’s wife and daughter were seriously injured, but ultimately recovered.